13 Personal Finance Cheat Codes That Can Change Your Life

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2:13what's up everybody and welcome to the personal finance podcast i'm your host andrew founder of masterbuddy.co and today on the personal finance podcast we're gonna be talking about 13 personal finance cheat codes that can change your life. If you guys have any questions, make sure you join the Master Money newsletter by going to mastermoney.co slash newsletter. And don't forget to follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or whatever podcast player you love listening to this podcast on. And if you want to help out the show, consider leaving a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player.

2:50And by the way, if you're watching on YouTube, make sure you hit that follow button and give me that thumbs up. I think that is one of the things that helps us on YouTube. And for next year in 2026, we're gonna do a lot of cool stuff on YouTube. So excited about that. And some of the bonus content that you guys are going to get there. So today we're gonna be diving into personal finance cheat codes that can change your life. And if you learn how to follow some of these cheat codes, you can dramatically improve your finances just by learning some of these things. And so we're going to go through 13 different things.

3:19And I want to bring you as much value as we possibly can. I want you to have idea generation when you go through this. And I want you to start taking action on some of these things when we go through this list. And so as we go and progress through this list, I want you to think through, well, how can I apply this to my life? How can I actually take action on some of these today? That's the way I want you to listen through on this episode. Now, some of these are going to be talking through financial freedom. Some of these are going to be talking through tax situations, ways to actually optimize the way that you move your money around.

3:46So there's a lot of different cool stuff we'll be diving into today. So action-packed episodes, without further ado, let's get into it. Number one, and if you've been listening to this podcast for any amount of time, you know this is probably going to be on this list. And this is because it is one of the ultimate cheat codes that are out there, which is to automate everything, making sure that you build systems that run without you when it comes to your finances. Now, why is this a cheat code? Why? Because willpower is finite. And so because willpower is finite, systems are the things that are going to help you build wealth.

4:23And for everybody out there, if you are not currently automating your finances, if you are manually moving money around within your finances, you are doing it wrong, my friends. So it's really, really important to make sure that we set up automation systems that work really well. This is why we prioritize it so heavily in Master Money Academy as we talk through why it is important to ensure that you automate everything. Now, automatic transfers to things like your investments is going to be really, really important. You don't want to have to remember every single month, oh, I got to move money over to those investments.

4:52Then I got to remember to actually invest the money after I move it over to the investments. No, instead, you just want it to automatically go into that account and then it auto invests for you. The same thing goes for savings. When you set up savings buckets, if you have not heard our episode talking about the bucket method, I highly encourage you to check that out. But when you set up savings buckets for your emergency fund, maybe your vacation fund, your down payment fund on the house, maybe it's a down payment fund on the car, you want to make sure that that money just automatically flows to the right locations.

5:21And so saving money is also a personal finance sheet code by automating it. And that's really important to know. Also bills. If you're still manually paying bills in 2025 or 2026, my friends, this is just going to be one of those things that we got to make sure that we make a shift here. Okay. When it comes to your bills, those need to be automated. Then you can check your budget or whatever else to look at those transactions. But really, it needs to be automated so you don't have to remember to go in and pay bills. People who rely on their memory to go and pay their bills, usually they're going to have late payments.

5:52They're going to be bogging down their brain with all these extra things they have to remember. So instead, I highly encourage you to automate that process and then check it on the back end. Now, here's what I would recommend is if you have never automated your finances before, let's create what we call a default month. A default month is to try to get all of your money to move for an entire month without you touching it. So set up your automations and see if you can get your entire financial picture to move around without you actually having to touch it. 100 % of your money is gonna move automatically when you do this.

6:23So this includes investing, this includes savings, this includes paying off your bills. Now, one other thing that you can do is if you feel like, oh, I get to the end of the month and if I try to automate my money, I'm not gonna have enough money at the end of the month. Well, you can set up automations on a weekly basis as well. This is going to be very helpful for a lot of folks. If you feel like you're living paycheck to paycheck, set it up on a weekly basis, and then you can monitor it over time as you begin to get ahead. Also, the beautiful thing about automation is that you can get your money to work for you sooner.

6:50So mentioning every single time you get paid, you can start to get those dollars invested every week or biweekly instead of just once a month. What does this do? This means your money is getting invested even sooner than it would have had before. And what do we want to do? We want to get those dollars working for us as soon as we possibly can. And so this is going to be a great way to get your dollars working early and often. So that's number one is automate everything. Number two is to prioritize high leverage skills over saving pennies. I cannot recommend this enough. So why is this a cheat code?

7:23Because your income can solve way more problems than frugality or penny pinching ever will. So I want you to focus as much of your attention as possible on increasing your income if you're living paycheck to paycheck. Sure, we want to make sure that we are cutting back expenses. That is one side of the coin. But we want to focus the majority of our time on our income. Why? Because for most people who are living paycheck to paycheck, the biggest problem for them is they have an income problem. And so once you start to raise your income, then we can figure out, okay, well, where am I overspending?

7:53What are some of these areas that I need to come back on? Here's the real truth. You can only cut back so far, but your income growth is exponential. It can continuously grow over time and is truly infinite if you can figure out how to unlock growing your income. And so there's a bunch of different ways that I want you to do this. I want you to spend the majority of your time learning and mastering high income skills. So this could be sales, this could be negotiation, AI tools now, communication, money management. All of these are high leverage skills that you can learn. And then it's using that income leverage to really grow the gap, the gap between your income and your expenses.

8:29Once that gap begins to grow dramatically, all of a sudden you have so much more room to develop. Every$10 ,000 raise that you get is going to be worth so much more than you going out and clipping coupons or cutting back on a couple of subscriptions. Instead, we want to focus as much time as we possibly can on our income. Cutting back that daily latte is not going to make a huge difference like learning how to grow your income will. We've got to make sure that we are focusing in on the right things and identifying the right things. Now, as you start to grow your income and as you increase your income, take some of that extra money.

9:01The 50-50 rule is what we talk about here. Take 50 % and put it towards wealth building activities. So growing your investments in your emergency fund. Those are the two places we want you to put it towards because this is going to help you build wealth over time. And so growing your income is one of the most important things. Now, once you begin to grow your income, you still need to know how to manage your money because there are so many different high earners out there who do not know how to manage money. And so they still live paycheck to paycheck, making 200, 300,$400 ,000 per year, they still can't get by.

9:33Why? Because they never learned how to manage money. And so once your money comes in, you need to also have the money management high leverage skills that are going to allow you to put those dollars in the places they need to go. Automation helps solve this problem. Because if you leave money, just sitting in your checking account, it is going to get commingled with everything else, and you are going to spend it. So instead, moving that money automatically every month is going to help you get those dollars invested sooner and help you manage money so much better. So both of the first two are going to actually sync up together.

10:02And if you do both together, oh my goodness, your financial life is going to change dramatically. They are real personal finance cheat codes. All right, number three is going to help a lot of you out there who struggle with motivation. If you struggle with motivation or staying motivated long-term, this is going to help you tremendously. It is treating your savings rate like a game and keep leveling it up. So here's what I want you to do is wealth isn't about just how much you make. It's also about how much you keep and invest. So first, on number two, we talked about, you know, earning more. But you also have to keep a portion of that income and put it towards things that are wealth building activities.

10:38And so as your income rises, I want you to focus your time and energy on increasing your savings rate. So if you don't already track your savings rate, this is going to be something that is going to be new for you. And so what I want you to do is track the percentage of your income that you put towards investments and your emergency fund. You may be listening right now and saying, I don't think I put anything towards those two things. Or you may be saying, well, I put 10, 15, 17%, whatever you do, let's think about this for a second and let's move a portion of our income towards savings and investments.

11:05Now, how much should it be? At a minimum here, we want you moving 20 % of your income towards savings and investments. Why? Because that is the starting point that is going to help you start to progress towards retirement. And so what we want to do is try to get to that 20 % number first. So this is level one is I want you to think through, okay, if I'm saving 5 % right now, or I'm saving 10 % right now, maybe I'm saving 12 % right now, I am going to try to level up every single month to get closer to that 20 % number. So maybe it is 1 % every single month that you increase your savings rates.

11:39You're not just ripping off the bandaid really quickly and feeling the pain and then you quit. Instead, you're going to slowly increase the dial for your savings rate until you get to that 20 % number. Then let's say your income increases and all of a sudden you get a raise. Amazing. Well, if you get that raise, let's dial it up to 21, 22%. And we're going to start to see this increase trying to get to a point in time that we feel comfortable with our savings rate. Let me tell you right now, I know people who retired early. You can retire. If you didn't know this, your savings rate is the catapult to a lot of different things.

12:10You retire in 17 years with a 50 % savings rate. Now you may be saying to yourself. A 50 % savings rate, how does anybody do that? There are countless examples in the financial independence community of people who are low earners and high earners who had a 50 % savings rate. They made sacrifices for short periods of time so that they could get to that point in time. Now, I'm just telling you, it's possible to do something like that. There are people in the financial independence community who had 70 % savings rate and retired in less than 10 years. Now, is it common? Absolutely not. Is it for everyone?

12:40Absolutely not. But if you really want to do it, your savings rate can dictate a huge difference maker in terms of how fast you can retire. And so learning how to increase that savings rate and gamifying this system. Some of y 'all just need some motivation and gamifying it is the motivation that you need. And so really, every increase is going to accelerate your retirement by years if you just increase it by 5%. Every 5 % is years off of the amount of time that you have to work, especially if you have a long enough time horizon. And so here's what I would say is you can increase it by monthly.

13:14Option two is you can increase it quarterly. Every quarter, every three months, you say to yourself, okay, I'm going to try to increase my savings rate another three, four, five percent until I can get to that 20 percent mark plus. And then every raise you get, every bonus you get, every windfall you get, use those to help increase your savings rate for the year. Let's see which year you can actually save the most in one given year. These challenges really work and they are something that you can really, really make a big difference on. And so treating savings like a game and making a goal of where you want it to be is going to help you tremendously.

13:48Number four is to use the tax code as a tool. So not enough people out there think of the tax code as something that they can utilize to try to reduce their taxes. Even if you're a W-2 employee, there are a lot of different things that you can do to reduce your taxes. The number one thing that you can do is making sure that you use tax advantage accounts. So things like your 401k, for example, If you max out your 401k in this given year, so$23 ,500 this year is what you could put in your 401k. Unless you're over the age of 50, then you can put even more into your 401k. So let's say you put$23 ,500 into your 401k.

14:20That means you do not have to pay tax on that money right now. And you've deferred that tax until a future date, until retirement when you start to pull that money out. That's a great tax hack. Or let's say you want to open up a Roth IRA. Well, with a Roth IRA, you pay taxes now. but then money goes in and grows tax-free and you can pull the money out tax-free. This is another fantastic option to reduce your taxable income long-term or the HSA, which has triple tax advantages, meaning money goes in tax-free, it grows tax-free in investments, and you can pull the money out tax-free as long as you have a qualified medical expense.

14:52It has those triple tax advantages. We have lots of episodes on the HSA if you want to check those out. All three of those are wonderful. Or maybe you want to save for your kid's college and you want to get a tax deduction on your college savings and a 529 plan is another great one. So this is why we talk about these accounts so much, because these are tax hacks for everyday people, including W-2 earners. Now, a second tax hack for a lot of folks out there is if you own a business, even if it's just a small LLC, maybe you own an LLC for rental properties. Maybe you own one for a small side hustle that you have going on.

15:24Maybe you have a side hustle that you're trying to turn into a full-time business. There are a lot of different small business deductions that you can utilize. The tax code is written very favorably for people who own businesses. And that's just the way that it is right now. And so we want to focus on those things that we can control. Even if you don't agree with that, or maybe you do agree with that, you want to focus on the things that you can control. So if you make money on the side in some way, shape, or form, having some sort of LLC could be beneficial. And so that is something too, that you want to make sure that you are taking advantage of those deductions.

15:53You can write off all sorts of different things. Number three is investing long-term is a tax benefit. So long-term investors have way better tax benefits than people who day trade or getting in and out of stocks within a given year. Because if you hold a stock for less than a year, you are gonna be paying a much higher rate in taxes than you would if you had long-term capital gains, which is holding a stock for over one year. So short-term capital gains, less than one year, long-term capital gains is over one year. And because of this, this is another way to help you, even if you're a W-2 employee, reduce your taxable income.

16:27And then there's a ton of other things as well. Understanding depreciation of assets. And when you have a business, you can depreciate all different types of assets. 1031 exchanges for real estate investors, the step-up basis or estate planning. All of this stuff is really, really important to note. And here's what I would say, is if you don't have a CPA in your corner helping you through this process, and we have a list of questions to ask a CPA, but if you don't have a CPA in your corner, it is very, very important to have one that can actually help you. And having someone who does things like tax strategy to reduce your taxable income is very important.

16:59Now, if you're a W-2 owner, you may still be taking the standard deduction, and that's okay, but there are other things that you can do to help reduce your taxable income in a given year, and that is gonna be one of the best things that you can do is learning how to optimize for taxes. Now, you don't have to be a tax expert. That's what the CPA is for. What you do need to do, though, is making sure you're taking action on some of this stuff because it is gonna save you hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, depending on how much money you're making. And so learning this stuff is a multi-million dollar decision.

17:26It is a true finance hack where you will have multi-million dollars in your pocket more if you just learn this stuff. So really, really important to make sure you're taking advantage of that. Now, number five, and this may not apply to every single person, but learning how to build more than one income stream early, even if it's a small one. So why is this a cheat code? Because we talked about how important income is. And if you are in some sort of job where your income is capped, maybe you're a teacher, or maybe you are a nurse, or maybe you are someone out there who really can't earn more money at your day job because you can't go and get raises.

17:58There's not upper level management that really you can earn a lot more. Then what we need to think about is are there other ways to have other income streams? Wealth is about taking your income and taking a portion of that income and putting into assets that will grow over time. And so if you can increase that income through a number of different ways, then there can be other options for you. So let's say for example, that you have a stable W-2 job. You're happy with that W-2 job. Maybe you're a teacher. We'll use a teacher as an example today. If you're a teacher, well, obviously your income is capped.

18:29There's only so much you can earn. Sure, you can become administration. You can become a vice principal, maybe a principal, maybe then go work for the county, but it's still only capped to a certain level. Getting to the top in education doesn't equal a ton more pay, okay? That's just the reality of that. But there are countless examples of teachers who have started side businesses that have grown into full-time incomes. And if you can start a side business, maybe you want to tutor on the side. That is a big one for a lot of teachers as they go and they can tutor. They can make$50 to$100 an hour by tutoring other students in a specific subject.

19:01Maybe you want to start a business that isn't even associated with education. And you do it on nights, you do it on weekends, you do it during the summertime so that you can work on that business. There are lots of different options out there for you, but building that scalable side hustle income is really important. Then taking those profits, reinvesting them into assets so that your assets can grow over time. I think for me personally, One thing to talk about when it comes to income is if you have one income stream and you work for someone else, you are one other person's decision away from having zero income streams.

19:29And so it's very important to make sure that if you only have one income stream, you try to at least get to two. Getting to two at least helps diversify income so that if something were to happen, then you still have something else to fall back on. Now, here's a great example is a lot of folks out there, if you're married, you have two income streams if both you and your spouse work. So that is two income streams where if one of you got laid off, at least you have a second income stream coming in. And so if you can come up with a third income stream, maybe it's a side business that you both work on together, that could be really important.

19:56Very early on for me, I realized quickly that when I was single, I was living paycheck to paycheck, got my finances together, but I realized I still have one income coming in. Then my wife and I got married. We had two incomes coming in, but then we would start these side businesses. One example that I've talked about in the past is we had a Christmas tree stand. So every year in December, we started this Christmas tree stand where we would sell Christmas trees on the side of the road. Yes, one of those side of the road Christmas tree stands. and it was a great little side income stream for us.

20:21And so it was something we'd work full time. Then we'd go to the Christmas tree stand at night before we had kids. And then we worked the Christmas tree stand on the weekend. We can make a few thousand dollars during the holiday season. Now there was other people out there who were much better at selling Christmas trees than I was and they would make tens of thousands of dollars every time. But these are side hustles. That's a great seasonal option, for example, where we would do a sprint on these Christmas trees and we would work double time during that timeframe. But then it was a month and a half, we knew it was over and then we came back.

20:48but we had an extra income stream available there. So there is a ton of examples like that. Now, this is why we do our episodes talking about side hustles that can turn into a full-time income because we want to generate ideas for you that can help you in the long run. All right, so if you've ever felt like your bank is working against you instead of for you, you're not alone. Between overdraft fees, monthly fees, and just trying to access your own money, it all adds up fast. That's why Chime is changing the way people think. Chime offers fee-free banking built for you, not the bank. That means no monthly fees, no overdraft fees with SpotMe, and access to thousands of fee-free ATMs, so you're not paying just to get your own money.